U.S. Politics megathread (merged)

[kila]

So Trump now has hospital coronavirus data going to the White House instead of the CDC. Presumably so he can then delay/manipulate the numbers directly and claim that the US is free of the virus.

 

Edited July 15, 2020 by kila

[JFK-1]

31 minutes ago, kila said:

So Trump now has hospital coronavirus data going to the White House instead of the CDC. Presumably so he can then delay/manipulate the numbers directly and claim that the US is free of the virus.

 

 

Before reading fully my brain made a quick evaluation drawn from the first few words, the psychology of wishful thinking no doubt. What instantly formed before properly reading was Trump hospitalised with coronavirus.

[Sharpie]

49 minutes ago, JFK-1 said:

I have the Mary Trump book in electronic and audio format. It's absolutely damning and i'm only through the prologue which was so damning it's scarcely credible this is even a real person and not a deranged fictional character she's talking about.

This man has multiple mental/psychological issues and inadequacies including a learning disability. A quote.
 

.
Meeting only four of the criteria typically suggests a narcissistic personality, he meets all nine. And narcissism isn't his only issue. He's a sociopath and even more.

Reading this is actually somewhat frightening. How in the world could this happen in a leading nation. The lunatic has literally taken over the asylum.

I don't have the training that his relative has, but my view of Trump from early on has been that he has serious mental or physchological problems. I have indeed stated it on here. It is unbelievable that this man does not only have the authority to push the nuclear button, but has the support of the Senate to allow him to do it.

[JFK-1]

10 minutes ago, Sharpie said:

I don't have the training that his relative has, but my view of Trump from early on has been that he has serious mental or physchological problems. I have indeed stated it on here. It is unbelievable that this man does not only have the authority to push the nuclear button, but has the support of the Senate to allow him to do it.

 

I'm glad she has a Ph.D in psychology, that makes it all the more difficult for the sycophants to dismiss her assessment that he's severely disturbed. She says he will be getting worse right now with crashing poll numbers and the fact it's difficult if not impossible to lie about the pandemic. The perfect storm for such a deranged personality.
 

The virus will be entirely unaffected by his pathological lying. She's effectively predicting a distinct possibility of ever more bizarre behaviour. She says that his father, her grandfather, was also a sociopath which served to simply accelerate and amplify the sociopathy of Donnie.

She also dismisses the claim that she's simply doing this to cash in. As she points out, if that was her motive she could have done this years ago. He didn't need to be president for her to cash in on a book about how how crazy he is. It would have sold long before that.

The motive now is that she's become like so many others, frightened that this disturbed individual is in such a position of power and the disastrous potential if he isn't removed in November.

[JFK-1]

And incidentally the book, which was only available for sale since yesterday, is already currently the number 1 best seller of 2020. The Bolton book about Trump is currently the number 3 best seller of 2020.

I wish Trump would read his nieces book, but know he wont. I believe he has never read a book in his life. He doesn't have the intellectual capacity to focus that long.

[JFK-1]

Quote from the book.
 

Quote

Encouraged by his father, Donald eventually started to believe his own hype. By the time he was twelve, the right side of his mouth was curled up in an almost perpetual sneer of self-conscious superiority, and

Freddy had dubbed him “the Great I-Am,” echoing a passage from Exodus he’d learned in Sunday school in which God first reveals himself to Moses.

 

Freddy is her father, the oldest son who her grandfather had hoped would be the one to inherit his business empire, not Donald. But Freddy wasn't interested, wanted to be a pilot and effectively left the family leaving the grandfather no option but to turn to Donald.

Which is another feature of his fragile ego, he knew he wasn't first choice. If this were the Godfather I see it as Michael remaining outside the family business and Fredo becomes the Godfather. Trump is Fredo.

[Maple Leaf]

According to the latest polls, Biden now has a 15 point lead over Trump nationally.  Trump will be hitting panic mode soon.  Get ready for increasingly bizarre behaviour from him and his boot-lickers.

 

Would he dare initiate a confrontation with Iran or North Korea?

[JFK-1]

Just now, Maple Leaf said:

Would he dare initiate a confrontation with Iran or North Korea?

 

See this is the thing, he's a freaking 100% nutcase. And his niece, who is a psychologist and has known him all her life, is predicting ever more bizarre behaviour.

She specifies that Trump has absolutely zero empathy for anybody. He's incapable of it. He has so many mental insufficiencies absolutely anything is possible when his extremely fragile ago ego is being bruised and the fantasy bubble he has cocooned himself in his entire life is bursting.

[trotter]

1 hour ago, Sharpie said:

I don't have the training that his relative has, but my view of Trump from early on has been that he has serious mental or physchological problems. I have indeed stated it on here. It is unbelievable that this man does not only have the authority to push the nuclear button, but has the support of the Senate to allow him to do it.

But thankfully the Two Man Rule means that a second person must approve the launch order. And whilst there are a number of Trump appointees in the relevant position to so this, i don't believe any of them are unhinged enough to do so. 

[Cruyff]

30 minutes ago, Maple Leaf said:

According to the latest polls, Biden now has a 15 point lead over Trump nationally.  Trump will be hitting panic mode soon.  Get ready for increasingly bizarre behaviour from him and his boot-lickers.

 

Would he dare initiate a confrontation with Iran or North Korea?

Well, if you want to boost your economy, assert your dominance, get higher ratings in the polls, there's nothing like a war to do that. 

[JFK-1]

6 minutes ago, trotter said:

But thankfully the Two Man Rule means that a second person must approve the launch order. And whilst there are a number of Trump appointees in the relevant position to so this, i don't believe any of them are unhinged enough to do so. 

 

From a December 2018 Washington Post article.
 

Quote

The abrupt and pointed resignation of Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis on Thursday alarmed official Washington. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) called him an “an island of stability amid the chaos of the Trump administration.” Retiring Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) told The Washington Post that “having Mattis there gave all of us a great deal more comfort than we have now.”

Mattis’s departure seems to be provoking unease, especially considering how dangerous our nuclear-command arrangements are.

The notion that Mattis, a former four-star Marine Corps general, could have blocked or defied a move by Trump to impulsively launch nuclear weapons may have seemed comforting, but it shouldn’t have been.

The secretary of defense has no legal position in the nuclear chain of command, and any attempts by a secretary of defense to prevent the president from exercising the authority to use nuclear weapons would be undemocratic and illegal.

With or without Mattis, the president has unchecked and complete authority to launch nuclear weapons based on his sole discretion.

FULL ARTICLE
 

 

[Boof]

Could some folk (don't know who!) quietly slip Trump into a Truman Show-type existence during a blacked-out limo drive somewhere?

[Maple Leaf]

17 minutes ago, Boof said:

Could some folk (don't know who!) quietly slip Trump into a Truman Show-type existence during a blacked-out limo drive somewhere?

 

I like the Trump/Fredo analogy.

 

Let's send Trump out for a boat ride with a *ahem* trusted bodyguard.

[JFK-1]

The nation is in a downward spiral. Worse is still to come.
 

Quote

Because of his incontinent use of it, the rhetorical mustard that the president slathers on every subject has lost its tang.

The entertainer has become a bore, and foretelling his defeat no longer involves peering into a distant future: Early voting begins in two states (South Dakota and Minnesota) 61 days from Sunday, which is 107 days before Election Day.

Never has a U.S. election come at such a moment of national mortification. In April 1970, President Richard M. Nixon told a national television audience that futility in Vietnam would make the United States appear to the world as “a pitiful, helpless giant.” Half a century later, America, for the first time in its history, is pitied.

Not even during the Civil War, when the country was blood-soaked by a conflict involving enormous issues, was it viewed with disdainful condescension as it now is, and not without reason: Last Sunday, Germany (population 80.2 million) had 159 new cases of covid-19; Florida (population 21.5 million) had 15,300.

Under the most frivolous person ever to hold any great nation’s highest office, this nation is in a downward spiral. This spiral has not reached its nadir, but at least it has reached a point where worse is helpful, and worse can be confidently expected.

The nation’s floundering government is now administered by a gangster regime. It is helpful to have this made obvious as voters contemplate renewing the regime’s lease on the executive branch. Roger Stone adopted the argot of B-grade mobster movies when he said he would not “roll on” Donald Trump. 

By commuting Stone’s sentence, Stone’s beneficiary played his part in this down-market drama, showing gratitude for Stone’s version of omertà (the Mafia code of silence), which involved lots of speaking but much lying.

Because pandemic prevents both presidential candidates from bouncing around the continent like popcorn in a skillet, the electorate can concentrate on other things, including Trump’s selection of friends such as Stone and Paul Manafort, dregs from the bottom of the Republican barrel.

“Longing on a large scale is what makes history,” wrote Don DeLillo in his sprawling 1997 novel “Underworld” about America in the second half of the 20th century.

Today, there is a vast longing for respite from the 21st century, which — before the pandemic, two inconclusive wars and the Great Recession — began with a presidential election that turned on 537 Florida votes and was not decided until a Dec. 12, 2000, Supreme Court decision.

Given Trump’s reckless lying and the supine nature of most Republican officeholders, it is imperative that the Nov. 3 result be obvious that evening.

This year, the pandemic will be an accelerant of preexisting trends: There will be a surge of early and mail voting. So, an unambiguous decision by midnight Eastern time Nov. 3 will require (in addition to state requirements that mailed ballots be postmarked, say, no later than Oct. 31) a popular-vote tsunami so large against the president that there will be a continentwide guffaw when he makes charges, as surely he will, akin to those he made in 2016.

Then, he said he lost the popular vote by 2.9 million because “millions” of undocumented immigrants voted against him. Making a preemptive strike against civic confidence, Trump has announced that the 2020 election will be the “most corrupt” in U.S. history.

The 2020 presidential selection process began with Iowa’s shambolic Democratic caucuses, a result not of corruption but incompetence, an abundant commodity nowadays.

It is scandalous that in many places casting a ballot requires hours of standing in line. Larry Diamond of the conservative-leaning Hoover Institution at Stanford discerns another scandal:

“The hard truth is that there has been a rising tide of voter suppression in recent U.S. elections.

These actions — such as overeager purging of electoral registers and reducing early voting — have the appearance of enforcing abstract principles of electoral integrity but the clear effect (and apparent intent) of disproportionately disenfranchising racial minorities.

One example was the decision of Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State (now Governor) Brian Kemp to suspend 53,000 predominantly African-American voter registration applications in 2018 because the names did not produce an ‘exact match’ with other records.”

This nation built the Empire State Building, groundbreaking to official opening, in 410 days during the Depression, and the Pentagon in 16 months during wartime. Today’s less serious nation is unable to competently combat a pandemic, or even reliably conduct elections. This is what national decline looks like.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-what-national-decline-looks-like/2020/07/14/ef499fd4-c5f0-11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html

 

[JFK-1]

Anyone else in the US notice that when trying to question those who seemingly support this idiot on how that can be justified many don't even try?

Instead of trying to defend him on any level they effectively ignore the question and don't talk about him at all.

Even more absurd, I find they resort to talking about Obama or Hillary Clinton as if that has any relevance to the incompetence of Trump. Neither Obama or Hillary have any power over the current unfolding disaster, only Trump does but they want to talk about these others not him. 

It's a disturbing mindset. Akin to sitting in a burning building but ignoring that, taking no steps to extinguish the flames, but rather just talking about the building across the street while the roof begins to cave in on you.

[Sharpie]

Not quite as sure as I was at one time, yet in a funny way I am more sure that he will not finish his first term. His ramblings are getting worse, and the circle of people who really dislike or hate him is nearly becoming complete. There is no shaming the man, but some of the ardent Senate followers are seeing their own election hopes becoming more in jeopardy, as my old mother used to say he just opens his mouth and lets his belly rumble, I suspect that there is at least one possible who thinks that stopping that rumble by violence if necessary, is getting more realistic. Let me say that I am totally against that type of solution.

[trotter]

3 hours ago, JFK-1 said:

 

From a December 2018 Washington Post article.
 

 

Hmm, I appear to stand corrected. That doesn't make me sleep any easier

[JFK-1]

For anyone who may think that the braggart Trump we have become used to seeing is a development crafted for a political face, think again. It's who he is and always has been. Absolutely nothing matters but him.

Demonstrating his complete lack of interest in anything but himself another quote from his nieces book which i'm currently reading. This incident takes place after Trumps father has died, on the day of the funeral and during the funeral service.

Also keep in mind that by this time no one for a moment thought that he was any business genius. On the contrary everything he had ever entered into on his own and without his father had turned to shit ending in bankruptcy. But the Donald still lives in the fantasy bubble of his own greatness. And even at his own fathers funeral that's all he can think of.
 

Quote

On the day of the funeral, Marble Collegiate Church was filled to capacity. During the service, from beginning to end, everyone had a role to play. It was all extremely well choreographed.

Elizabeth read my grandfather’s “favorite poem,” and the rest of the siblings gave eulogies, as did my brother, who spoke on behalf of my dad, and my cousin David, who represented the grandchildren.

They told stories about my grandfather, although my brother was the only one who came close to humanizing him. For the most part, in ways both oblique and direct, the emphasis was on my grandfather’s material success, his “killer” instinct, and his talent for saving a buck.

Donald was the only one to deviate from the script.

In a cringe-inducing turn, his eulogy devolved into a paean to his own greatness. It was so embarrassing that Maryanne later told her son not to allow any of her siblings to speak at her funeral.

 

[ri Alban]

11 hours ago, Jambo-Jimbo said:

 

Sadly there are many thousands just like them all over America.

 

Here is Sky's Alex Crawford getting an ear full from an anti-masker (Skip to 3:13 if you don't want to watch the whole report).

 

That woman at 3:13 doesn't post on the Coronavirus thread, does she? She sounds like some on there. 

[ri Alban]

7 hours ago, Justin Z said:

 

No. In legalese the presidential pardon power is "plenary"—absolute. There's no power of reversal.

 

An incoming president could direct his Department of Justice to open an investigation into some other crime the convicted criminal committed. Historically, politicians have shied away from doing that kind of thing, for better of for worse, *because of the appearance of going after your political enemies.

 

Now? Who knows.

Thanks, I was wondering the same thing.

 

 

*What about Trump? What's the procedure with him. 

 

 

[JFK-1]

Excerpt from 'Too Much And Never Enough' by Mary L. Trump

Though Donald’s fundamental nature hasn’t changed, since his inauguration the amount of stress he’s under has changed dramatically. It’s not the stress of the job, because he isn’t doing the job—unless watching TV and tweeting insults count.

It’s the effort to keep the rest of us distracted from the fact that he knows nothing—about politics, civics, or simple human decency—that requires an enormous amount of work.

For decades, he has gotten publicity, good and bad, but he’s rarely been subjected to close scrutiny, and he’s never had to face significant opposition. His entire sense of himself and the world is being questioned.
 

Donald’s problems are accumulating because the maneuvering required to solve them, or to pretend they don’t exist, has become more complicated, requiring many more people to execute the cover-ups.

Donald is completely unprepared to solve his own problems or adequately cover his tracks. After all, his fathers systems were set up in the first place to protect him from his own weaknesses, not help him negotiate the wider world.
 

The walls of his very expensive and well-guarded padded cell are starting to disintegrate. The people with access to him are weaker than Donald is, more craven, but just as desperate. Their futures are directly dependent on his success and favor.

They either fail to see or refuse to believe that their fate will be the same as that of anyone who pledged loyalty to him in the past. There seems to be an endless number of people willing to join the claque that protects Donald from his own inadequacies while perpetuating his unfounded belief in himself.

Although more powerful people put Donald into the institutions that have shielded him since the very beginning, it’s people weaker than he is who are keeping him there.

 

When Donald became a serious contender for the Republican Party nomination and then the nominee, the national media treated his pathologies (his mendacity, his delusional grandiosity), as well as his racism and misogyny, as if they were entertaining idiosyncrasies beneath which lurked maturity and seriousness of purpose.

Over time, the vast bulk of the Republican Party—from the extreme Right to the so-called moderates—either embraced him or, in order to use his weakness and malleability to their own advantage, looked the other way.
 

After the election, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Mitch McConnell, all of whom bear more than a passing psychological resemblance to his father Fred, recognized in a way others should have but did not that Donald’s checkered personal history and his unique personality flaws make him extremely vulnerable to manipulation by smarter, more powerful men.

His pathologies have rendered him so simple-minded that it takes nothing more than repeating to him the things he says to and about himself dozens of times a day—he’s the smartest, the greatest, the best—to get him to do whatever they want, whether it’s imprisoning children in concentration camps, betraying allies, implementing economy-crushing tax cuts, or degrading every institution that’s contributed to the United States’ rise and the flourishing of liberal democracy.
 

In an article for The Atlantic, Adam Serwer wrote that, for Donald, the cruelty is the point. For Fred, that was entirely true. One of the few pleasures my grandfather had, aside from making money, was humiliating others.

Convinced of his rightness in all situations, buoyed by his stunning success and a belief in his superiority, he had to punish any challenge to his authority swiftly and decisively and put the challenger in his place. That was effectively what happened when Fred promoted Donald over my father Freddy to be president of Trump Management.
 

Unlike my grandfather, Donald has always struggled for legitimacy—as an adequate replacement for Freddy, as a Manhattan real estate developer or casino tycoon, and now as the occupant of the Oval Office who can never escape the taint of being utterly without qualification or the sense that his “win” was illegitimate.

Over Donald’s lifetime, as his failures mounted despite my grandfather’s repeated—and extravagant—interventions, his struggle for legitimacy, which could never be won, turned into a scheme to make sure nobody found out that he’s never been legitimate at all.

This has never been more true than it is now, and it is exactly the conundrum our country finds itself in: the government as it is currently constituted, including the executive branch, half of Congress, and the majority of the Supreme Court, is entirely in the service of protecting Donald’s ego; that has become almost its entire purpose.
 

His cruelty serves, in part, as a means to distract both us and himself from the true extent of his failures. The more egregious his failures become, the more egregious his cruelty becomes.

Who can pay attention to the children he’s kidnapped and put into concentration camps on the Mexican border when he’s threatening to out whistleblowers, coercing senators to acquit him in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt, and pardoning Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who’d been accused of war crimes and convicted of posing for a picture with a corpse, all within the same month?

If he can keep forty-seven thousand spinning plates in the air, nobody can focus on any one of them. So there’s that: it’s just a distraction.
 

His cruelty is also an exercise of his power, such as it is. He has always wielded it against people who are weaker than he is or who are constrained by their duty or dependence from fighting back.

Employees and political appointees can’t fight back when he attacks them in his Twitter feed because to do so would risk their jobs or their reputations.

Freddy couldn’t retaliate when his little brother mocked his passion for flying because of his filial responsibility and his decency, just as governors in blue states, desperate to get adequate help for their citizens during the COVID-19 crisis, are constrained from calling out Donald’s incompetence for fear he would withhold ventilators and other supplies needed in order to save lives. Donald learned a long time ago how to pick his targets.
 

Donald continues to exist in the dark space between the fear of indifference and the fear of failure that led to his brother’s destruction. It took forty-two years for the destruction to be completed, but the foundations were laid early and played out before Donald’s eyes as he was experiencing his own trauma.

The combination of those two things—what he witnessed and what he experienced—both isolated him and terrified him. The role that fear played in his childhood and the role it plays now can’t be overstated. And the fact that fear continues to be an overriding emotion for him speaks to the hell that must have existed inside the House six decades ago.
 

Every time you hear Donald talking about how something is the greatest, the best, the biggest, the most tremendous (the implication being that he made them so), you have to remember that the man speaking is still, in essential ways, the same little boy who is desperately worried that he, like his older brother, is inadequate and that he, too, will be destroyed for his inadequacy.

At a very deep level, his bragging and false bravado are not directed at the audience in front of him but at his audience of one: his long-dead father.
 

Donald has always been able to get away with making blanket statements (“I know more about [fill in the blank] than anybody, believe me” or the other iteration, “Nobody knows more about [fill in the blank] than me”); he’s been allowed to riff about nuclear weapons, trade with China, and other things about which he knows nothing; he’s gone essentially unchallenged when touting the efficacy of drugs for the treatment of COVID-19 that have not been tested or engaging in an absurd, revisionist history in which he’s never made a mistake and nothing is his fault.
 

It’s easy to sound coherent and somewhat knowledgeable when you control the narrative and are never pressed to elaborate on your premise or demonstrate that you actually understand the underlying facts.

It is an indictment (among many) of the media that none of that changed during the campaign, when exposing Donald’s lies and outrageous claims might actually have saved us from his presidency.

On the few occasions he was asked about his positions and policies (which for all intents and purposes don’t really exist), he still wasn’t expected or required to make sense or demonstrate any depth of understanding.

Since the election, he’s figured out how to avoid such questions completely; White House press briefings and formal news conferences have been replaced with “chopper talk” during which he can pretend he can’t hear any unwelcome questions over the noise of the helicopter blades.

In 2020, his pandemic “press briefings” quickly devolved into mini–campaign rallies filled with self-congratulation, demagoguery, and ring kissing. In them he has denied the unconscionable failures that have already killed thousands, lied about the progress that’s being made, and scapegoated the very people who are risking their lives to save us despite being denied adequate protection and equipment by his administration.

Even as hundreds of thousands of Americans are sick and dying, he spins it as a victory, as proof of his stunning leadership. And in the event that anybody thinks he’s capable of being serious or somber, he’ll throw in a joke about bedding models or lie about the size of his Facebook following for good measure.

Still the news networks refuse to pull away. The few journalists who do challenge him, and even those who simply ask Donald for words of comfort for a terrified nation, are derided and dismissed as “nasty.”

The through line from Donald’s early, destructive behavior that Fred actively encouraged to the media’s unwillingness to challenge him and the Republican Party’s willingness to turn a blind eye to the daily corruption he has committed since January 20, 2017, have led to the impending collapse of this once great nation’s economy, democracy, and health.
 

We must dispense with the idea of Donald’s “strategic brilliance” in understanding the intersection of media and politics. He doesn’t have a strategy; he never has.

Despite the fluke that was his electoral advantage and a “victory” that was at best suspect and at worst illegitimate, he never had his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist; his bluster and shamelessness just happened to resonate with certain segments of the population.

If what he was doing during the 2016 campaign hadn’t worked, he would have kept doing it anyway, because lying, playing to the lowest common denominator, cheating, and sowing division are all he knows. He is as incapable of adjusting to changing circumstances as he is of becoming “presidential.”

He did tap into a certain bigotry and inchoate rage, which he’s always been good at doing. The full-page screed he paid to publish in the New York Times in 1989 calling for the Central Park Five to be put to death wasn’t about his deep concern for the rule of law; it was an easy opportunity for him to take on a deeply serious topic that was very important to the city while sounding like an authority in the influential and prestigious pages of the Gray Lady.

It was unvarnished racism meant to stir up racial animosity in a city already seething with it. All five boys, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam, were subsequently cleared, proven innocent via incontrovertible DNA evidence.

To this day, however, Donald insists that they were guilty—yet another example of his inability to drop a preferred narrative even when it’s contradicted by established fact.
 

Donald takes any rebuke as a challenge and doubles down on the behavior that drew fire in the first place, as if the criticism is permission to do worse. Fred came to appreciate Donald’s obstinacy because it signaled the kind of toughness he sought in his sons.

Fifty years later, people are literally dying because of his catastrophic decisions and disastrous inaction. With millions of lives at stake, he takes accusations about the federal government’s failure to provide ventilators personally, threatening to withhold funding and lifesaving equipment from states whose governors don’t pay sufficient homage to him.

That doesn’t surprise me. The deafening silence in response to such a blatant display of sociopathic disregard for human life or the consequences for one’s actions, on the other hand, fills me with despair and reminds me that Donald isn’t really the problem after all.
 

This is the end result of Donald’s having continually been given a pass and rewarded not just for his failures but for his transgressions—against tradition, against decency, against the law, and against fellow human beings. His acquittal in the sham Senate impeachment trial was another such reward for bad behavior.

 

The lies may become true in his mind as soon as he utters them, but they’re still lies. It’s just another way for him to see what he can get away with. And so far, he’s gotten away with everything.

[Unknown user]

1 hour ago, JFK-1 said:

Excerpt from 'Too Much And Never Enough' by Mary L. Trump
 

He's worst ****

 

[JFK-1]

Our wonderful police, who are doing a fantastic job, they're incredible, are killing even more white people than black people, they're fantastic. And you're nasty. #No lives matter.

Except for mine. #I''m so fantastic
 

 

Edited July 16, 2020 by JFK-1

[kila]

34 minutes ago, JFK-1 said:

Our wonderful police, who are doing a fantastic job, they're incredible, are killing even more white people than black people, they're fantastic. And you're nasty. #No lives matter.

Except for mine. #I''m so fantastic
 

 

 

 

 

 

[JFK-1]

When Trump recently held one of his yeeha fests in Tulsa Oklahoma the governor of the state had no problems with that, despite an ongoing pandemic of historic proportions.

In fact he had so little problem with it he attended the yeeha fest in full yeeha mode, unmasked.

Soon after Tulsa experienced an infection spike which then ricocheted out across the entire state of 3.5 million people. Report from yesterday.
 

Quote

 

The Oklahoma State Department of Health on Wednesday reported 1,075 new coronavirus cases across the state, bringing the total cumulative number of the state’s positive cases to 22,813.
 

This was the first time the state reported more than 1,000 new COVID-19 cases in the daily update.

 

And also yesterday, oh the irony, the governor himself was reported to have tested positive for covid-19.  🤣
 

 

Edited July 16, 2020 by JFK-1

[JFK-1]

How in the world can this freak possibly be re-elected in such an atmosphere. It must be unprecedented to have groups of people who are ideologically for on party turning on it because of one man. 

There's not a single thing anybody could say to support his fitness for office. Which leaves only one thing, they must be voting for him because they like his racism so much the nation can burn down for all they care.

In my view if he were to be re-elected the nation is fully exposed as having a population a very large segment of which is outright and even proudly racist.

I think this woman, a 'lifelong Republican' who didn't vote for him in 2016 and wont in 2020 summarises the entire disaster that is Trump fairly well.And from an added perspective of her family being among those who he contracted for work then never paid.
 

 

Edited July 16, 2020 by JFK-1

[JFK-1]

I'm dismayed that apparently the only thing many of them think makes him unfit for office is the unfolding pandemic disaster. While that's significant it's on multiple levels not even the worst thing about his tenure. It was more than obvious he was a total disaster long before the pandemic struck.
 

 

[JFK-1]

The “billionaire” who hides his tax returns.

The  “very stable genius” who hides his college grades.

The “businessman” who bankrupted 3 casinos and lost over $1B in 10 yrs.

The “playboy” who pays for sех.

The “Christian” who doesn’t go to church.

The “philanthropist” who defrauds charity.

The “patriot” who dodged the draft.

The “innocent man” who refuses to testify.

The “President” who takes no responsibility.

The “tough, strong man“ who wears makeup and hairspray but never a mask.

The “deal maker” who has yet to close a deal.

[Jambo-Jimbo]

16 minutes ago, JFK-1 said:

The “billionaire” who hides his tax returns.

The  “very stable genius” who hides his college grades.

The “businessman” who bankrupted 3 casinos and lost over $1B in 10 yrs.

The “playboy” who pays for sех.

The “Christian” who doesn’t go to church.

The “philanthropist” who defrauds charity.

The “patriot” who dodged the draft.

The “innocent man” who refuses to testify.

The “President” who takes no responsibility.

The “tough, strong man“ who wears makeup and hairspray but never a mask.

The “deal maker” who has yet to close a deal.

 

Trump being Trump, if he was as successful a businessman as he claims to be, he'd be shouting from the rooftops about how great & successful he was and how much money he'd made, the fact that he wants to hide his tax returns is extremely telling for a man who needs to portray himself as being better than everyone else.

[Boof]

2 hours ago, JFK-1 said:

The “Christian” who doesn’t go to church.

 

Now hold on a minute.

 

He does go to church.

 

Well...he did go...to one church...and wave a Bible around...after his Reichssicherheitsdienst had tear-gassed innocent Americans to clear a path for him...

[JFK-1]

The “businessman” who bankrupted 3 casinos and lost over $1B in 10 yrs.
 

An example of how witless and incompetent Trump is when it comes to business. I read this in his nieces book. He thought well if one casino could make me money three could make me even more money.

But, think about it this way. Say you build a bookies and you start to make some money out of it. Are you going to build another two nearby and think they will also be profitable?

Or would you think that's impossible. They will simply split the available custom between them till none become profitable?

That's what this idiot Trump did with the casinos. Built 3 which were simply competing against each other for the available custom.

So he's paying three times the overheads that he would for just one , for the same custom. And that's aside from the massive interest repayments on the money he borrowed to build them.
 

Quote

Less than two weeks before the casino opened, Marvin B. Roffman, a casino analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott, an investment firm based in Philadelphia, told The Wall Street Journal that the Taj would need to reap $1.3 million a day just to make its interest payments, a sum no casino had ever achieved.

“It was doomed way before the start,” said W. Bucky Howard, who was promoted by Mr. Trump to president of the Taj five days after it opened, 

 

The business genius at work, starting businesses that were "doomed way before the start"

Now he's moved up to bankrupting a nation.

[Maple Leaf]

4 hours ago, JFK-1 said:

The “businessman” who bankrupted 3 casinos and lost over $1B in 10 yrs.
 

An example of how witless and incompetent Trump is when it comes to business. I read this in his nieces book. He thought well if one casino could make me money three could make me even more money.

But, think about it this way. Say you build a bookies and you start to make some money out of it. Are you going to build another two nearby and think they will also be profitable?

Or would you think that's impossible. They will simply split the available custom between them till none become profitable?

That's what this idiot Trump did with the casinos. Built 3 which were simply competing against each other for the available custom.

So he's paying three times the overheads that he would for just one , for the same custom. And that's aside from the massive interest repayments on the money he borrowed to build them.
 

 

The business genius at work, starting businesses that were "doomed way before the start"

Now he's moved up to bankrupting a nation.

 

When Trump became president the US national debt was about 18 trillion dollars.

 

Now it's over 26 trillion dollars.

 

This is with a Republican president and a Republican Senate.  For generations, the Republicans claimed to be the fiscally conservative party.

[JFK-1]

11 minutes ago, Maple Leaf said:

For generations, the Republicans claimed to be the fiscally conservative party.

 

Maybe they once were, I don't know but they aren't now and haven't been in decades. I think it all began to fall apart from them during the Reagan tenure. The most economically successful president since then was Clinton.

Obama may have done better if he hadn't inherited a massive debt from Bush and started his tenure at the outset of the 2008 crash. I just don't understand what Americans see in the Republicans at all.

The only thing I can think of is that Republicans play a religious and a gun card. But what's the state of a nation that will elect a government on such frankly irrelevant to the health and prosperity of the nation issues.

A gun wont give them healthcare or a good paying job and contrary to what they might think neither will God. Looks to me like God gave them Trump and covid-19. As toxic a mix as you could imagine.

And it could get even worse. There are novel new viruses cropping up more frequently than ever before for a variety of reasons. Just one of them being encroachment into the habitat of wild animals forcing them into close proximity with humans.

There are some epidemiologists who have been predicting since before this pandemic that not only was a pandemic coming. But that the chances are good that sooner or later we're likely to be hit by more than novel and deadly new virus at the same time. 

Imagine that happening before this corrupt, criminal imbecile is out of that office.

[JFK-1]

36 minutes ago, Maple Leaf said:

 

When Trump became president the US national debt was about 18 trillion dollars.

 

Now it's over 26 trillion dollars.

 

This is with a Republican president and a Republican Senate.  For generations, the Republicans claimed to be the fiscally conservative party.

 

And one more thing just came to mind about Trump which happened right at the beginning of his tenure. A classic example of how unbelievably stupid and entirely unfit for any kind of office this moron is.

This was actually caught on video, someone is talking to him about some policy issue or other and I can't remember precisely what it was. Either foreign or domestic.

Trump clearly doesn't understand a single thing about the issue which to be fair may be the case with any number of newly incumbent presidents. but the logical step from there is to consult the experts on the issue, get them to explain it and then discuss the implications of one decision versus another.

Trumps question to the guy talking about this issue he didn't even understand? "Was Obama for it?" The guy answers yes so Trump immediately responds with well i'm against it.

Think on the mind numbing stupidity of that.  

[Justin Z]

ICE was racist enough before Trump. Now?

 

Just straight up kidnapping American citizens because they're brown.

 

Abolish it.

[ri Alban]

1 minute ago, Justin Z said:

ICE was racist enough before Trump. Now?

 

Just straight up kidnapping American citizens because they're brown.

 

Abolish it.

The UK did this to white folk, but it only became a scandal when a ship called Windrush appeared. Funny that. Where's everyone's rage, when Canadians, NZealanders and Australians are detained and deported. 

 

waiting... 

[JFK-1]

2 minutes ago, ri Alban said:

The UK did this to white folk, but it only became a scandal when a ship called Windrush appeared. Funny that. Where's everyone's rage, when Canadians, NZealanders and Australians are detained and deported. 

 

waiting... 

 

I think i'm waiting for an explanation of the relevance to the curse of Trump. And 15 year olds being basically snatched off the street into custody, flown to another state, not even being allowed to call a parent. Or anybody for that matter.

[ri Alban]

8 minutes ago, JFK-1 said:

 

I think i'm waiting for an explanation of the relevance to the curse of Trump. And 15 year olds being basically snatched off the street into custody, flown to another state, not even being allowed to call a parent. Or anybody for that matter.

Yes it's a horrendous way to treat anyone, but the relevant point is, this isn't just because they're brown. But I suppose that doesn't fit with people's agendas. 

 

Anyway, carry on. 

 

 

Oh and the proof, it happened to my wife. A white Canadian by birth, brought home Scotland at the turn of the 1970s, and became an illegal under Theresa May. But I don't see any BBC dramas about this and how it was because she was white. But hey only BLM. 

6 years we went through hell, so I think experience of this Trump's(Correct thread) your perspective. 

 

👍

 

 

Oh and you don't own this forum. 

Edited July 17, 2020 by ri Alban

[JFK-1]

11 minutes ago, ri Alban said:

Yes it's a horrendous way to treat anyone, but the relevant point is, this isn't just because they're brown. But I suppose that doesn't fit with people's agendas. 

 

Anyway, carry on. 

 

 

Oh and the proof, it happened to my wife. A white Canadian by birth, brought home Scotland at the turn of the 1970s, and became an illegal under Theresa May. But I don't see any BBC dramas about this and how it was because she was white. But hey only BLM. 

 

👍

 

 

Oh and you don't own this forum. 

 

What agenda? We're talking about Trump, that's the agenda on this thread.

And you entered into it with something entirely unconnected, not even in the same country, not even in the same category.

And now saying something about "this isn't just because they're brown" when the post you were quoting was describing an incident that patently was all about being brown.

They wouldn't have abducted a white 15 year old girl and flown her to an ICE facility in another state with no chance to speak to her parents.

A 15 year old brown 3rd generation citizen of the US is basically abducted and flown to another state with no chance to talk to her parents. Entirely unconnected in any way.

Edited July 17, 2020 by JFK-1

[XB52]

1 hour ago, JFK-1 said:

 

What agenda? We're talking about Trump, that's the agenda on this thread.

And you entered into it with something entirely unconnected, not even in the same country, not even in the same category.

And now saying something about "this isn't just because they're brown" when the post you were quoting was describing an incident that patently was all about being brown.

They wouldn't have abducted a white 15 year old girl and flown her to an ICE facility in another state with no chance to speak to her parents.

A 15 year old brown 3rd generation citizen of the US is basically abducted and flown to another state with no chance to talk to her parents. Entirely unconnected in any way.

Good luck getting any sense out of aussieh. Long suspected he is a troll, trying to discredit the independence movement with his crazy statements on that subject. His support for Trump's behaviour just confirms my view

[Justin Z]

4 minutes ago, XB52 said:

Good luck getting any sense out of aussieh. Long suspected he is a troll, trying to discredit the independence movement with his crazy statements on that subject. His support for Trump's behaviour just confirms my view

 

Literally the first person I've ever seen (as quoted, unfortunately, since on ignore) say "only BLM."

 

Imagine spouting all this rhetoric about Britain's exploitation of Scotland, going on and on about it for literal years, then knowing what we all do about American history as well as watching it happen to a different group of people. Then when they rise up with their own sort of independence movement, with similarly righteous justification, discounting it because their skin colour is different than yours.

 

Or dragging a thread about Donald Trump and the US off-topic by talking about Britain under Tories, and refusing to admit that acknowledging one group's oppression in no way diminishes the oppression of others.

 

Really just pitiable. There are other words for it, but we'll go with pitiable.

 

Edited July 17, 2020 by Justin Z

[Maple Leaf]

11 hours ago, JFK-1 said:

 

Maybe they once were, I don't know but they aren't now and haven't been in decades. I think it all began to fall apart from them during the Reagan tenure. The most economically successful president since then was Clinton.

Obama may have done better if he hadn't inherited a massive debt from Bush and started his tenure at the outset of the 2008 crash. I just don't understand what Americans see in the Republicans at all.

The only thing I can think of is that Republicans play a religious and a gun card. But what's the state of a nation that will elect a government on such frankly irrelevant to the health and prosperity of the nation issues.

A gun wont give them healthcare or a good paying job and contrary to what they might think neither will God. Looks to me like God gave them Trump and covid-19. As toxic a mix as you could imagine.

And it could get even worse. There are novel new viruses cropping up more frequently than ever before for a variety of reasons. Just one of them being encroachment into the habitat of wild animals forcing them into close proximity with humans.

There are some epidemiologists who have been predicting since before this pandemic that not only was a pandemic coming. But that the chances are good that sooner or later we're likely to be hit by more than novel and deadly new virus at the same time. 

Imagine that happening before this corrupt, criminal imbecile is out of that office.

 

I don't understand the appeal of the Republican party either.

 

Their agenda seems to be very simple ... anti-abortion, pro gun rights, get conservatives appointed to as many judicial positions as possible, and wave the "America First" flag. They seem to lack coherent policies on healthcare, immigration, and education.

 

I think that demographics in the US is working against them and they will become increasingly irrelevant.

[Beni]

This is his press secretary's folder.

 

 

Kind of says it all that she has sections marked 'absurd', 'hate' and 'lies'.

[JackLadd]

18 minutes ago, Maple Leaf said:

 

I don't understand the appeal of the Republican party either.

 

Their agenda seems to be very simple ... anti-abortion, pro gun rights, get conservatives appointed to as many judicial positions as possible, and wave the "America First" flag. They seem to lack coherent policies on healthcare, immigration, and education.

 

I think that demographics in the US is working against them and they will become increasingly irrelevant.

 

A big chunk of the gop base is evangelical and vote on abortion abolition only. Gun nuts are probably the second biggest constituency.  It's an extreme country all in.

[trotter]

57 minutes ago, fancy a brew said:

This is his press secretary's folder.

 

 

Kind of says it all that she has sections marked 'absurd', 'hate' and 'lies'.

Crazy or not, she's hot though...

[JFK-1]

There's an unmissable decline taking place in the US. With hindsight I think their place in the sun was a relatively brief event. Prior to WW2 they were already an economic/industrial giant but in science they were nothing and they may return to that status.

When Churchill was chomping at the bit to get them into the war what he wanted wasn't scientific expertise, they had none. He wanted manpower and factories churning out the basic weapons of the war.

They created the atom bomb but that would have been impossible without the plethora of European scientists in the project all working on concepts which had been developed in Europe.

Post war they found themselves in a world where the major industrial competition, namely Europe had been laid waste while they were entirely untouched. Europe was wrecked and bankrupted while they came out of the war richer than they went into it.

This led the population into a mindset where they were the absolute greatest. When the reality was that the competition had simply been temporarily removed.

That lasted maybe 3 decades at most, by the mid 1970's not only the competition had the usual competition recovered new competitors were springing up. Japan and now China obvious examples.

Add on to that the fact that not only have they evolved into an all out science denying mentality they make it so expensive to acquire higher education that others are going to surpass them in terms of scientists and engineers etc. China is churning out half a million engineers a year.

They will remain a major power for the foreseeable future simply due to their size. But their days as a pre-eminent scientific power are fast disappearing. And scientific expertise is going to be the major factor going forward.

 

Getting back to Trump he didn't make the Republicans the party of crazy, they were already that for decades. He simply took it to the next level, removed any veneer of sanity. 

[Maple Leaf]

20 minutes ago, trotter said:

Crazy or not, she's hot though...

 

She's not my cup of tea.  Here's what she said recently, proof that people in the White House are living in a different reality:

 

This week, as states such as Florida, Texas and Arizona have set records for coronavirus infections and intensive care units and morgues have filled up, has exposed the willful blindness of a White House that seems bio-sealed from the reality of the pandemic.

 

"We believe this President has great approval in this country. His historic Covid response speaks for itself," White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Thursday, encapsulating the bizarre parallel universe of an administration that thinks one of the most disastrous government failures of the modern age is a roaring political success.

[JFK-1]

1 minute ago, Maple Leaf said:

His historic Covid response speaks for itself

 

That's actually true, LOL.

[Sharpie]

11 hours ago, ri Alban said:

Yes it's a horrendous way to treat anyone, but the relevant point is, this isn't just because they're brown. But I suppose that doesn't fit with people's agendas. 

 

Anyway, carry on. 

 

 

Oh and the proof, it happened to my wife. A white Canadian by birth, brought home Scotland at the turn of the 1970s, and became an illegal under Theresa May. But I don't see any BBC dramas about this and how it was because she was white. But hey only BLM. 

6 years we went through hell, so I think experience of this Trump's(Correct thread) your perspective. 

 

👍

 

 

Oh and you don't own this forum. 

Ri my daughters two children were born in Canada. Both have U.K.Passports which they received because of their mothers Scottish birth. I am surprised your wife had such difficulties, she must have past through immigration when they returned, and id no one in the six year fight advise of the birth rights clause. As stated though totally ifferent to w wee girl being arrested and conveyed to the otherside of the Country for being brown.

[JFK-1]

i see no way out of this for them as long as they have a government insisting it doesn't exist. Though at state level even in Republican strongholds they're now beginning to ignore Trump and respond to reality. Facemasks being mandated in more states all the time.

Their infection numbers and fatalities are just continuing on this upward curve with new records being broken daily. It's worse than it has ever been while Europe is getting it under control albeit expecting a second wave which they're prepared for. 

The US on the other hand never got the first wave in check.
 

Quote

In Texas and Arizona, morgues are filling up in the hardest-hit areas and officials are bringing in coolers and refrigerated trailers to store bodies.

 

In South Texas' Hidalgo County, some patients have to wait on a stretcher for 10 hours before being examined due to lack of resources, said Dr. Ivan Melendez, the public health authority.

"We are in dire need, and we are exhausted," he said. "We had four ICU patients. Now we have 211. We had three people on ventilators. Now we have 135."